whatever It Takes (To Crack Your Armor Of Glass)
by aewea
Summary: Hatake Kakashi is born a girl, different than she was in any other retelling of her life, with softer curves But sharper edges, and made of material easier to crack, but so much harder to shatter


welcome to the shit I wrote instead of working on my actual WIPs. first of all a warning because there are some dark stuff in this fic, and I was worried about this chapter being a little too unsettling, but when I asked my friend how disturbing this is she said it's only a two out of ten. So like, Idk, but be careful?

PLEASE READ THIS OR YOU MIGHT BE CONFUSED:

so for this chapter we have an OC yamanaka (who ISN'T IMPORTANT and is just here to give us an outsider POV) and since we don't know all that much about how their powers exactly work I'm going with this: it work similar to the waterfall in naruto shippuden (Falls of truth) and they can not only see the person's true form, but also how their mindscape looks, and they can use it to determine others' mental health. Also, physical touch in the mindscape lets them scan their subjects' memories.

2\. For a mental evaluation they are only supposed to look at a few recent memories and nothing else!

Another thing: if you like this and wanted more please tell me? I have another fic I haven't updated in ages and a novel I'm working on, so the chances are I won't write any new chapter for this if no one is interested.

Plz enjoy~

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If someone asked Haruto what Hell looked like yesterday, he'd have shrugged and mumbled something vague about flames and eternal punishments. Now, he can safely say it looks like the inside of Hatake Kakashi's mind

It doesn't matter that there's no flame or that the air isn't filled with the screams of the damned; Haruto knows he's in hell the moment he closes his eyes in one of the introgoration rooms in konoha's T&I headquarters and opens them again in a dark tunnel, ankle deep in blood and with one of his feet stuck in the crushed chest of a corpse.

Haruto is a Yamanaka, a jounin of Konohagakure and one of the top introgratters in the T&I squad. He's been in the head of missing-nins and criminals alike, seen their true self that is sometimes so hideous it can't even be called human anymore, but when he enters Hatake's mind for his yearly mental evaluation and finds himself surrounded by mangled bodies in different stages of decomposition; he's not sure he won't find something worse here.

Still, he's a hardened shinobi, and it's relatively easy for him to ignore the urge to throw up and will himself to move forward. Or at least it's easy until he tries to take his first step and his foot drags against the insides of the corpse's ruined ribcage, tearing flesh and coming free with a sickening _crunch _as the remaining bones give away . After that, it's admittedly harder to swallow the bile in his throat and keep going.

The tunnel stretches on in front of him, narrow and dark and impossibly _red_. It's everywhere, the blood. It swirls around his legs, rising and falling in sync with the fast pace of his panting breaths and threatening to drown him for trying to disturb this world's peace, for daring to bethe only one alivein this graveyard of dead bodies floating around.

But that's not right, can't be right, because he knows he's not alone. There's a dark shape in the distance, the shadow of another offender daring to step on the land of the dead with a still beating heart and one who does so without flinching because it's _his_. Haruto knows who it is, can tell Hatake apart even without the telltale sign of his silver hair, and he finds himself taking another step because he needs to see for himself, needs to _know _what the true self of a demon looks like.

He doesn't know what is it that hastens his pace, if it's curiosity or such great fear it erases all his rationality and makes him move forward instead of running the other way; only that he keeps going, stumbling forward even as gore bubbles around his legs and stray organs get crushed beneath the soles of shoes. the dark figure rises, turning as if to greet him and-

Haruto breath catches in his throat.

He's not sure what he thought Hatake's real self would like. A monster, a beast , perhaps a creature so deformed it can't even be called human; but no matter how dark and twisted his expectations were or how horrendous they seemed; a young girl wasn't one of them.

But that's what Hatake _is_, a smudge of white standing out in this never ending world of red and black and Iwa-brown, and Haruto would call her a misfit if not for the void in her lone grey eye blending so thoroughly with the darkness around.

"You're the first one to make it this far," She says as a way of greeting, shaking off the clutch of the corpse clinging to her to get to her feet. The surface rises with her, as if unwilling to let its victim go, but she doesn't pay it any mind as she takes a step closer to him. It's mesmerizing in a horrid way, how at ease she looks in such a place as she glides forward; unaware -or perhaps uncaring- of the droplets of scarlet slipping down her naked form to join the sea underneath. "Most give up when they see the corpses floating around."

He doesn't say anything, doesn't _have _anything to say, but Hatake doesn't seem to mind. She stops a few feet away from him, tilting her head slightly as if he's a difficult puzzle a new angle might help her solve, and he barely manages to stifle a gasp when the movement shifts the curtain of silver hair covering the left side of her face and reveals the sight beneath.

Her eye is _gone_, the sharingan no longer just marred by a scar but ripped out so roughly the empty socket is visible beneath the shredded eyelids. It's painful to even look at, a mess of swollen skin and strange looking fluids, and Haruto's mouth is already working before he can even think of showing tact. "What happened to your sharingan?"

The question feels like glass shreds in his mouth, painful to spit out but even harder to swallow, and Hatake recoils like he cut her with it as well. She raises a hand to cover the sight, and this time, Haruto can't fight back a flinch when the infected wound sizzles and oozes a new trail of white liquid at her touch.

"Obito said he wanted his eye back." comes the simple answer, lightly delivered with a glance back at the half-crushed corpse she was cradling before his arrival as if that explains everything, and perhaps the most horrifying thing is that it does.

Haruto should turn back now, detach himself from all this madness and go back to the real world where things make sense and the dead can't demand for their missing body parts back, but something keeps him rooted to the place. There's a secret in front of him, already unveiled and spelt out in delicate features and an unmistakingly female body covered only by the waist deep blood, and he wants to -_needs to_\- know why it was ever hidden in the first place.

He raises his hand, holding it out to her palm out in a silent request, and the flash of hesitation in Hatake's eye is a more welcome sight than the outright rejection he expected. He understands her reluctance, can feel the same trails of icy doubt running deep beneath his skin and clashing with the flames of curiosity commanding his actions, and the truth is that he's _afraid_. There's fear of what's to come; of what he'll see if he keeps going, of just how far the surface can rise to drown him.

It's a strange thrill by itself.

"You won't like what you'll see," Hatake says at last, giving him a warning, an answer and a choice all at once. Haruto apprentices the gesture, even if he's too much of a coward to tell her he's about to do something far worse than just checking the memories of her last mission like he's supposed to.

The brush of her fingertips against his offered palm, when it finally comes, is tentative at best, but the waves of memories that follow it are by no means gentle. They slam into him, rough and unforgiving in their demand to not only be seen but _lived _by another, and suddenly there is the taste of words he doesn't remember ever saying in his mouth, the trail of tears he never shed drying on his cheeks and the burn of more than a decade worth of cuts shredding his skin and stitching it back together just as fast.

Fleeting scenes flash before his eyes, hundreds of tiny puzzle pieces falling into place to shape the world's darkest nightmare. They are vivid at first, a tangible mess of loneliness and pain and loss (oh sage so much _loss_), but just when he feels like he's going to crumble under their weight they start to get foggy, losing their terrifying accurity bit by bit until all that is left is a blur of muffled voices and simple emotions only a toddler can feel:

The burn of a tender touch, a hug when the other person's whole body is trembling, the echoes of 'It's a secret Kakashi'-And then Haruto is back in the tunnel, throwing up everything in his stomach and with an entire life worth of new memories stored in his brain.

He knows only a few minutes have passed, can tell it's not been long by the way the scenery remains untouched around him, but Haruto isn't the same as he was before. He recognizes every rotting corpse now, can remember their last gasped out pleas, the way their faces slowly lost all color as a chidori tore their hearts to shreds; and it makes standing upright even harder now that he knows whose blood is trying to drown him.

And yet, Hatake is still standing, her back straight with all the authority of a true ruler of hell, but her head bowed under the weight of the crown that comes with the title. Haruto looks at her, sees the emptiness in her eye that has even less light in it than the dead bodies around, and finds himself gasping out one last question because even after all this, he still needs to know.

"Will the darkness ever end?" he asks her, and she laughs. It's not a cruel sound, but it is not kind either. It simply is, like most things in this world are.

"Darkness?" she says, and she has the force of thunder and the fragility of a butterfly's wing behind her words, "what are you talking about? This is simply the twilight of dusk."

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plz review and tell me how i did?

P.s: this chap got a little out of hand, but i think the other ones are going to be less poetic


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